BY ANGEL T. GONZÁLEZ  
HAVANA—Tai Chao, who commanded the brigade, remembers perfectly the cloudy morning of February 17, when they went out into the streets for the first time. Three platoons marching briskly through Havana’s Chinatown, facing the agitated and frightened reaction of the community’s residents. “Tai Chao, communist!” some shouted by way of insult. Overseas Chinese were considered then citizens of the secessionist Taiwan, which was allied to the U.S. and was an enemy of the People’s Republic of China.

The Cuban Revolution was barely a year old. Fidel Castro had not declared himself the leader of a socialist country, and Cuba still maintained diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But many wealthy merchants and groups that controlled Chinatown’s prostitution and drugs already sensed that Cuba would wind up entering the orbit of communist countries, and had begun packing their bags.

The events of Feb. 17, 1960, were therefore a type of confirmation. But above all, it was the first time that the José Wong Brigade of the Revolutionary National Militia (MNR) went out into the street: 50 uniformed Chinese wearing sky-blue shirts, olive-green pants, and black berets; armed with German Mauser rifles from the Second World War; and giving and taking orders in the Cantonese dialect. A historical oddity in Cuba and in the entire continent….

“[My mother] lived in the Canary Islands,” [Tai Chao said], “and was a novice in a convent.” When she didn’t get enough votes to become a nun, the family, in shame, sent her off to Cuba with other relatives. There she studied nursing. And there, in 1928 in Havana, she married Guillermo Eng, a merchant and journalist who covered Chinese social events (Wu Gu Xiang was his real name). He had arrived on the island at the beginning of last century to engage in trade. Elvira Herrera Pérez, Tai Chao’s mother, died when her only son was less than 18 months old.

The future head of the José Wong Brigade lived with his father, the one who gave him the name Tai Chao, which means “shield of the emperor”—officially his name is Pedro Jesús Eng Herrera. Raised by an Asian nanny until he was five, he didn’t learn Spanish until he began attending school in Chinatown.

Afterward he began earning a living selling “foods and fine liquors,” he says with pride. Until a few months after the triumph of the revolution, in 1959, when he, like thousands of Cubans, joined the MNR. That was when the idea of organizing a detachment of oriental militiamen began to take hold in his mind.

With Chinese patience, Tai Chao obtained the official approval of the MNR’s leadership to train Chinese militarily…. September 2, 1960, was seven and a half months after the Chinese militia brigade had burst onto the scene under Tai Chao’s sponsorship. On that day, Fidel Castro, speaking to a mass rally in the Plaza of the Revolution that called itself the General Assembly of the People, announced the establishment of relations with Communist China and the breaking of all relations with the “puppet regime” of Taiwan. To shouts of support, the General Assembly of the People approved Cuba’s entry into red diplomacy.

The definitive assault by the Asian militia against vice in Chinatown was not long in coming. It happened on October 10, 1960, the eleventh anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. On that day the Chinese-Cuban troops symbolized the conquest of the territory by raising the flag of Communist China atop the Chung Wah Casino, symbolic building of the Chinese community. Days earlier, the casino’s president had absconded with all the association’s money and taken asylum at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo.

It was the first time in the history of the young Cuban republic that the flag of a Communist country flew overhead….

The building, which had also been the office of the Chinese Nationalist Party, was expropriated by Tai Chao’s militiamen. “We became a force of revolutionary order, and we watched over all the dens of iniquity that existed in Chinatown, devoted to prostitution, gambling, and the sale of opium. All were closed down,” Tai Chao recalls.

This was not the only mission of this brigade, however. In 1961 the revolutionary government learned that a landing of Cuban exiles was being prepared with logistical support from the U.S. Army. But it did not know the date or place of the attack. Together with other militia battalions, the Chinese brigade was assigned the defense of the Isle of Pines (today the Isle of Youth)… where it was expected the invasion would take place….

The invasion finally occurred in April 1961, but it was at the Bay of Pigs in Matanzas province. The Chinese militia members were sent to study at a military school. Later most of them joined the Revolutionary National Police. The rest returned to their jobs as waiters and store clerks. Of the 50, only five survive today as octogenarians.  
 
 
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